Martin over at ghacks writes about why he still uses an antivirus program occasionally but no longer keeps one running in the background.

It's not a crazy idea, and i've been tempted to do the same.  In the end I've opted to keep an antivirus program running in the background and just accepting the small performance hit and occasional system slowdown from antivirus scanning.

The truth is though, as Martin points out, i know that my basic system is safe, and scanning all my files all the time seems wasteful.  When new files come in the mail, i would know enough to scan them manually even if i didn't have a background resident scanner.

Anyone else out there sufficiently brave and confident in their security policies to not run an antivirus tool?

http://www.ghacks.ne...-antivirus-software/

1. Newsletter Editorial

It's Darwin here, welcoming you to another edition of the Donationcoder newsletter. I'm going to keep my initial comments brief, so that you can get right to the meat of the newsletter, but would like to take this opportunity to say a big welcome to everyone who has joined over the past two weeks and to encourage everyone to participate on the forum if you haven't already.

We'll soon be having our 3rd annual fundraiser, and we're asking for your help in deciding how to celebrate and how we should approach the delicate issue of asking for financial support from the public.  Let us know how we can make the site more useful for you!


2. Official Announcements

Calling all programmers -- we need your participation! Throughout November and December we are running some fun programming contests.  To help celebrate our Getting Organized Experiment 2007, November's programming contest is to pick some small productivity-related utility you can code in a few days and enter it in the Getting Organized Programming Challenge.  You only have until December 1st to submit something, but everyone who enters will be recognized.  Now's your chance to participate on the site and create something others will find useful.

• Official List of Current DonationCoder.com Contests - Next deadline December 1st!
• November Discounts and Giveaway - Defense Wall (Host Intrusion Prevention System)
• Program Update: Form Letter Machine 1.07.01 released
• Program Update: fSekrit 1.3 released
• Program Update: Random Mixtape Maker 1.06.68
• tcl eggdrop encryption functions updated - for mircryption users

3. Your Input is Requested

Donationcoder is first and foremost a community and thrives because of member activity and participation. Not sure where to jump in?  Here are some good threads to get you started:

• To wide-screen or not to wide-screen
• Laptop or Desktop — which are you?
• DonationCoder.com Yearly Fundraiser for 2007 - Advice Requested Please

Personally I'm not very fond of Windows Vista, and i'm still using windows XP Pro.  But if you're using Vista, Cybernet news has you covered.  They are giving away a few copies of TweakVista commercial, which also exists in a free version, and looks like a nice helper utility to tune all your vista settings.

http://cybernetnews....-giveaway/#more-8850

I never managed to get an invitation to oink, and now it's dead...
But I found a fantastic review of what goes on on the music industry today, and how the internet can self-organize into a better service than any of the paid ones (take that, industry!).

For quite a long time I've been intending to post some sort of commentary on the music industry - piracy, distribution, morality, those types of things. I've thought about it many times, but never gone through with it, because the issue is such a broad, messy one - such a difficult thing to address fairly and compactly. I knew it would result in a rambly, unfocused commentary, and my exact opinion has teetered back and forth quite a bit over the years anyway. But on Monday, when I woke up to the news that Oink, the world famous torrent site and mecca for music-lovers everywhere, had been shut down by international police and various anti-piracy groups, I knew it was finally time to try and organize my thoughts on this huge, sticky, important issue.

http://www.demonbaby...f-oink-birth-of.html

Sean Howard, over at www.squidi.net, is making good progress on his goal to come up with 300 unique ideas for game play mechanics. At this point Sean had developed 58. Now, these aren't just one or two sentences like, "Make the blood blue, instead of red.", but are equivalent to full length articles. There are some real nuggets of gold in there. And Sean is nice enough to give them away for nothing more than a mention in your game. If you want to build a game, but can't think of an idea, or you need a little something to spice up an existing game you are working on, check out Three Hundred Mechanics.

http://www.squidi.net/three/index.php

Science magazine had a photo competion..
2007 Visualization Challenge Winners

Scientific data are the currency of science, but they often buy little understanding outside science itself--or even outside the narrow confines of a single scientific discipline. But when data are brought to life through images, illustrations, computer graphics, and animations, they can stimulate excitement, awe, new ways of looking at things, and, above all, a broad appreciation of even the most esoteric scientific information. The stunning photograph on the cover of this week's issue of Science is a case in point. It reveals the humble and ubiquitous seaweed Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) to be an intricate natural construction that looks for all the world like an abstract painting.

For the past 5 years, Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have cosponsored annual challenges to encourage cutting-edge efforts to visualize scientific data. Our interest in supporting these competitions is based on our firm belief that bringing data to life visually will be increasingly important not only for public understanding of science and engineering but also for improving communication across scientific disciplines.

This year, we received more than 200 entries from 34 states and 23 countries representing every continent except Antarctica. A committee of staff members from Science and NSF screened the entries, and an outside panel of experts in scientific visualization reviewed the finalists and selected the winners.